Vittoria Colonna, certainly the most renowned and successful woman writer of her age in Italy, was widely admired by her peers for her impeccable Petrarchan verses and her public image of unimpeachable chastity and piety. Her work went through numerous sixteenth-century editions, but these tailed off after the 1560s and subsequent editorial neglect belies her status at the forefront of literary production by secular women in the Renaissance.